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Randolph’s View: “Manxiety”, A Man’s Worst Fears

Manxiety is as term that many have raised eyebrows and howled at as a new meme for the excuse of distraught male behavior. It’s also a controversial term in that it stirs up backlash of gender bias, purporting the male experience is more superior and important that the woman’s in that it gets its own category.

However, I support the use of the word “manxiety” from my perspective as an Occupational Therapist and Life Coach. Occupational therapy takes the roles an individual lives out daily throughout their lives and examines how illness, handicap or dysfunction affects each of those roles.

The roles, combinations of roles and sub-roles are as numerous as there are individuals. Men may have the experience of role as husband, father and son. Their role is played out in their career as a colleague and hobbies/interests such as intramural player, golfer, softball, or musician, etc.

So I am going to break down the term “manxiety” as it relates to emotional pain and stress in the Male. In my work as a life coach and mind performance coach, I am finding a commonality in the stresses and emotional pain men are experiencing.

I am going to use “My Worst Fears” to categorize how men have shared their fears and stressors. When I query a client as to how they know they have a problem, they respond well “my worst fear” is “fill in multiple blanks”.

In dealing with their worst fears, their mind has to recall a way to handle problems. The subconscious mind goes back to “emotional learnings” taken in during early childhood and adds in learned references and observations from life as lived up to the present.

Primarily it goes back to observing our mother/father or someone close to us. Our implicit memories of how we learned from and mimicked them become the template and pattern for how we will cope.

A “my worst fear” is “What will my father think?” “What if I disappoint my dad?” “My dad always worries about me”. When asked when did you first recall feeling this way, the client then reverts to my dad always worried about my mother, my mother was always fearful. So the coping pattern the client has fallen into is “fear” and how he observed his mother fearful as a young boy and dad being captivated by his wife’s fear and trying to protect her.

With this particular client, I used my toolbox of skills to dampen down his present fears using EFT, memory reconsolidation, and NLP. Once I lowered the tension and perception of fears and stressors to zero, then I add back in what the client does want: safety, peace, calm, love and joy.

The way men deal with stress and emotional pain varies from fight, flight or freeze to the point of adrenal overload. They may self “medicate” by abusing substances such as food, drugs, alcohol, sex, porn, exercise, gambling, obsessiveness and even hyper religious. The extreme is attempting suicide as they don’t know how to escape or hide any further from their pain.

But the only true way to permanently get rid of stress and emotional pain is by letting go of the past and replacing it with what they do desire in life. It is possible. It doesn’t have to take forever or be incremental. It doesn’t have to be discussed or understood ad infinitum.

With diligent work and a capable coach, old mental patterns can be removed and replaced with new neural pathways. Letting go of Manxiety and embracing a vision of Life as Vibrant as you want it to be.

Randolph is a Mind Performance and Life Coach based in Washington DC/Worldwide. He is a self-described “Mind-Soul Mechanic” engineering new vibrant paths for his clients lives for their Wellness, Health, Relationships, Career and Sports Performance. www.randolphadair.com